Never thought I’d put my thoughts on it down here. Try to stay away from political and societal issues that are, after all, decisions made based on more than fact; personal opinions arise from moral convictions, religious beliefs, and like today, experience.
Working in the frameshop, a knock on the door that makes me look up to spot through the French door widow panes a face peering in. Always get a kick out of people knocking on a barn door–but then, how many barns have double French doors? They shield their eyes and look in through the panes. I see them standing there looking for me. Today, it was a face I hadn’t seen in maybe thirteen years.
We hugged, we clung to each other with tears in our eyes. She brought in her mother, and her life partner. She’d been living in Boston for ten years or so, and I’d just kept up with her through a mutual friend from the next town over where all three of us served on the volunteer ambulance corps. I knew she was gay, and I’d heard that she and her friend had raised three kids into college since they’d been together. Just as happy for them as I’d been two weeks ago for Louis and his fiancee, Carol when they stopped in just before their wedding, I was delighted to see how happy S. was with her partner, L., and how accepting her 90-year old mom was. I’d spent much time with S. when we both lived in Harwinton, and knew her mother well.
We spent well over an hour catching up, trading e-mail addresses and phone numbers as they planned to leave. I hugged them all as they stepped outside to their car. Then I told her how neat it was that Louis had just stopped by, how great it was to see old friends, and that Louis had gotten married.
The look on S.’s face hit home hard. Here she was, introducing someone she’d lived with for over a decade but couldn’t call a spouse.
It’s made me rethink a lot of what I thought were pretty set but fair decisions on the non-heterosexual marriage laws.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
You bring up an interesting issue for the idea of leadership. Experience is influencing your thinking here. Should leaders, those who would lead, come at the world with a “wider” view of the world, which is what you’re talking about here? Breadth of experience as a factor in decision making. Very complex, very important.
I think, that just like family influence, religious beliefs, peer influence, education, and interests, experience cannot help but be a factor in a decision or viewpoint of any issue.
One the one hand, no one can experience personally (rather than second-hand informational) everything that a leader might face. There’s the old question of whether Catholic priests, for example, are qualified to counsel on marriage problems.
On the other, we must be open to the fact that an experience can and should change what we consider to be our ethical, moral, political, etc. stands.
Very complex issue indeed.
Complexer and complexer: Experience must be considered as both enlightenment and shading of an issue. Simple example: You go to a restaurant on an evening when the chef is drunk and overcooks the food and your waiter’s wife just left him; your impression of the experience is a bad one–but not necessarily a true account of the restaurant itself.
By the same measure, which textbook, which media, which scientist you read is but a single view from each.
Can you go to the same restaurant every night for a year? Is that sufficient “experience?” Can you read absolutely everything ever printed on the subject of life on Mars? We must simply be openminded enough to accumulate, sort, sift, and make a reasonable judgment.
Very complex, indeed. I can’t help but eventually come to the conclusion (on this issue) that two people who share a life should be afforded the same rights as any two other people who share a life, regardless of gender.
In this political environment, as our elections draw near, I continue to hope that people will challenge themselves to open their minds and hearts. I try to keep it personal (what would happen if it were my son or daughter?), but I’ve come to know too many of these people who have opened my eyes, and no longer need it to be a personal issue to come to the same conclusion. For me, now it has become a human issue.
I recognize the depth of morality that is being questioned, but again and again, I have come to believe that morality is not a thing written in stone after all, but a thing lived by real flesh and blood humans. Thanks for taking a moment to share your personal encounter, and how it left you with questions, as well as with a human reaction to a very human face on the issue.
The ultimate goal for any issue, I suppose, would be to make it human. Learnt in Poli Sci once upon ago that the State’s needs must be placed higher than personal needs. I wonder if there’s an invisible hierarchy to that principle.